KP The Lowardian War
by Absentialuci
Summary: Following the deafeat of Warhawk and Warmonga, the Lowardians attack Earth. Heroes, both familiar and not, emerge. Combines three other works Winterborn, Denouement, Requiem plus new content. Hope you and enjoy, and drop a review!
1. 01 Battle of the Winterborn

**All characters/organizations (barring the UN) belong to Disney and their respective artists.**

**The song lyrics were shamelessly co-opted from Cruxshadows, 'Winterborn.'**

Most of these chapter were originally other fic's; the new content starts towards the middle chapters. It took me a while to realize I was writing a larger narrative. So here are the stories 'Winterborn,' 'Denouement,' 'Requiem' (split and spliced), and all new content (starting with 'Preparation') as part of the Lowardian War anthology. I hope you like it.

* * *

"Thrusters aft, evasive ac—"  
The impact was so powerful, yet so quickly over, that it was like a subliminal flash; one quake and it was gone.  
Global Justice Commander Josh Menke quivered in his command seat like a thrown knife, bellowing out of the side of his mouth without turning his face for an instant from the field-of-combat display. "Status!"  
His Control first, Lieutenant Don Perkins, spun to face him. "It was a grazing blow, sir. Took off an entire section of the lower deck, but our lateral motion was enough to carry it past us instead of gutting the ship."  
Menke pulled up a quick wireframe schematic of the damage. The piece carved cleanly from the side of the ship looked like a bullet wound. Fortunately, though, the decks hit were only storage and auxiliaries—the damage was minimal.  
"All right, keep moving, keep moving! Steph," his voice was suddenly compassionate, "how are you doing?"  
The officer on Helm, Second Lieutenant Stephanie Swift, nodded her head at him slightly with a quick, jerky motion. Her hands were flying over her command board in an uninterrupted stream; a sheen of sweat glistened on her face. Menke grimaced and rubbed one of his fingers across the knuckles of his left fist. She wasn't even the Helm first; his first had gone down with a nasty mutation of the gravs, and Swift, the second, had been brought up to fill in for her shift.  
Now, she was running sequence after sequence of overlapping evasive maneuvers, manhandling the ship on one cracked engine chamber, and despite it all, managing to bring the ship about for repeated strafing runs on the Lowardian cruiser.  
He wasn't sure if he could have handled the burden. It was a wonder that she could.  
A new voice cut in from the side.  
"Launch, launch! Plasma launch, twelve MPs off port!"  
Menke whirled once more to confront the massive, glowing projection of the field-of-combat holopanel. The FOC was shimmering and flickering with a chaotic mixture of blue, red, white, and green dots; golden threads connected them with tiny boxes of text displaying sensor readings and data tags.  
"What's the velocity?" He addressed the question to the empty air. The sensor officer picked it up.  
"1200 feet per second, sir. Accelerating."  
_Fast one. Shit._  
"All about, give me as much speed as you can. See if you can maintain those engines at 80." One of the three engines had sustained a huge crack in yesterday's engagement when a pulse of plasma had passed too close. Last-minute heroics from engineering had been enough to keep it partially running, enough to fight with, but Menke had been assured that if he pushed it to hard, it _would_ melt down.  
"C'mon, let's sprint the bastard for the finish! Aft camera, magnify to size."  
The camera's vision doubled, tripled, and finally found the approaching plasma torpedo with a 10x visual magnification. Looming on the screen, it closed with terrifying speed.  
Nervously, Menke gave a compulsive smack of his palm against the side of his chair. "Faster, you shit!"  
With any other bridge crew, he reflected, people would be starting to wonder by now. The catalog of engagements against the Lowardians, mostly crushing defeats with horrifying losses, told one thing for certain: evade, escape, or destroy the enemy before they let off a shot, but of all things, you will never, _ever_ outrun them.  
The officers worked quietly and efficiently at their various tasks, nobody giving off even a murmur of dissent.  
Such trust could be dangerous.  
"Plasma closing," the sensor officer reported calmly. Lieutenant Steven Donahue was a lifer, a veteran of a dozen engagements against the Lowardians; he spoke as if he were ordering dinner. "Impact imminent."  
With a quick hand, Menke set collision alerts ringing throughout the ship. Then, facing forward, he fixed his gaze on his command display and issued a series of machine-gun orders.  
"Positional thrusters, rotate to 70° contraspin. Give me two sets of emergency thrusters online and hot, route control to my board. Side camera! And _don't let up that speed._"  
With his eyes, he tracked the approach of the shot on his display and the visual screen. 10,000 . . . 5000 . . . _too fast_.  
Quietly, he said, "No matter what happens, Stephanie, don't stop what you're doing."  
He wasn't sure if she'd heard him. He prayed that she had.  
Suddenly, with only a momentary flash of unmistakable light as its harbinger, the massive charge of molten plasma was on the side-viewing camera—and with a hammering fist, he slammed into activation every emergency thruster he had.  
The entire bridge of the _Winterborn_ seemed to freeze for a heartbeat.  
Then, in the space of one infinitesimal mote of time and the next, it leapt fifty horizontal meters, and cleanly, neatly, the charge of plasma slipped through the gap in the keel of the cruiser.  
Thrown against the side of his console with brutal force, Menke wrenched himself back into his seat, every muscle aching. The plasma was on the screen, then past—coughing, he croaked out, "Aft," and the sensor officer flicked the main display to the aft camera—there it was, turning in a tight, elliptical arc. Half of the glowing mass was dissipated already into the surrounding maw of vacuum, and the charge was moving more slowly, but it was still very much there.  
He coughed around bruised ribs. "Control," he said, "damage?"  
He could sense Perkins shaking his head. "Negligible; some bubbling of the hull from the close pass. Cauterized a few conduits." Menke turned slightly now, to see Perkins exhaling, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. "That was a . . . hell of a move, sir."  
Maybe. Menke decided not to mention how much of a role luck played in such maneuvers. Luck and desperation. Some things were better left unsaid. "Let's make it worth something.  
"Weps, what's your status?"  
The lumbering Sam Deville looked up from the weapons station. "We lost a couple dozen missile pods from that stunt of yours. Cooked off right in the chambers. Kinetics are hot and ready.  
"Battery's as charged as it's going to get with one engine on the fritz. Laser CIWS and point-defenses are all online." Deville shifted uneasily. "All ten of the nukes are still off-safe and armed. You're sure—"  
"Yes." He didn't have time to debate the exigency of that particular order. Not now. "Countermeasures are active?"  
The weapons officer gave a perceptible tilt of his head. "Yes, sir."  
The plasma was back on the screen, streaking in for the kill.  
"Very well. Helm, prepare for cold-start burn, 30 degree starboard rotation and all speed. Weps, on my signal—" No, that wouldn't work. No time. "Belay that. On the signal to burn, I want you to launch every rear chaff pod that we have."  
Deville blinked. "_Chaff?_"  
"Now!"  
It was a credit to their training that despite being bewildered, they both moved instantly and simultaneously, with absolute faith in his orders.  
A thought chased across his head. _These are the kind of people we're fighting for._  
As the _Winterborn_ exploded into motion, Deville entered a rapid-fire string of commands, bringing online and then auto-salvoing the entire rear array of 250 chaff pods. They blew out in a thick, silent, glimmering cloud, filling the air with hundreds of pounds of electrically-charged shrapnel.  
The ship screamed in protest as Lieutenant Swift squeezed every last joule of energy from the agonized engines. A cold burn brought the engines into use faster than anything else, but its output of power was stutteringly irregular until the tubes could catch up to the heat of the reactors.  
They were just beginning to gain real speed, pulling toward the altered course, when the remaining plasma struck the cloud of steel chaff.  
It was like watching a tidal wave smash through fifty miles of dense cotton. At first, the enormous, powerful blast of molten fire tore through the storm of metal like a cannon through glass. But slowly . . . ever so slowly, it seemed to stumble, as if tripping on its own weight, and catch, and lose coherence.  
The _Winterborn_, desperately scrambling for velocity, arched onto its new heading—just as the shreds of the plasma ripped out of the metallic haze. Its energy dispersed, its containing field ruined, it was literally torn to fragments.  
It missed the _Winterborn_ by five hundred meters, and sailed past into space, all control lost.  
The chaff field was almost wholly destroyed; its pieces had been first vaporized, then slowly condensed into liquid, and finally solidified into a single, massive sphere of ruined metal.  
Menke released his death grip on the arms of his chair, closed his eyes, and took three full, deep breaths. Only then did he look up once more at the FOC display and begin to think.  
He considered doing a full status round of the bridge crew, as was proper, but decided not to bother. "Anything drastic I should know about?"  
Shaking of heads.  
"Okay. Steve," he said, "What's that Lowardian bastard up to?"  
The sensor officer consulted his board.  
"She's . . . still just sitting there, sir. I don't . . . I don't know. She hasn't moved an inch, but readings still have her fully powered and active."  
Perkins looked over at Menke. "Maybe a mobility kill, sir? That nuke we threw at her might have nailed something with EMP."  
Menke shook his head. "Doubtful. EMP's never done shit in any previous engagements."  
"We did put a few Kinetic rounds down her gullet before that, sir. Maybe something got jarred loose. Or maybe another ship got to her before us and damaged her."  
Sighing, Menke massaged his temples, trying to mitigate the pounding in his head. "Maybe. But in any case, they've still got their guns—so they're still dangerous.  
"Especially this son of a bitch. I don't know what it is, but it's not normal."  
Deville spoke up. "There have been those rumors of that rogue flagship that's been rampaging through the systems. Supposedly bigger than any cruiser we've seen before, travels without any support. And they say she's taken on two full-sized task forces that were assigned to handle her and ruined them."  
Trying to smile, Menke got only a wretched half-smirk. "This would be the same one that they say single-handedly dusted the entire Ganymede defense fleet without taking a hit?"  
Swift finally took a moment to lean back from her board. She looked exhausted as she put her two cents in—"That part's no rumor, sir. My brother was staffing the Ganymede planetary defense center when it happened. Six out of the seven ships defending the colony, including the cruiser _Queen Mary,_ were either wiped out or crippled. The _Mary_ managed to jump out, but only on AI—everybody aboard was dead."  
She met Menke's eyes with her own. "I don't know what did it. GJ Fleet's still saying it was just another attack force. But . . . "  
"How could a single ship destroy six of ours in one go, without us at least tagging her?" Menke scowled. "They're good, people—but they're not that good."  
"Permission to speak freely?" asked Donahue drily. Menke looked at him in mild surprise, but nodded. Donahue raised his voice slightly.  
"They jumped into the system without any warning, but with an energy reading that was off the charts. They were using some kind of thermal ducting, though, so not even _we_ saw her at first, and we were right next to her.  
"Ten Kukri's. All of them were snapped out of space practically before they left our shadow. Then no less than _six_ Kinetic heavies—including the prototype super heavy that the Sanctuary tech heads have been raving to us about—and she took every one of them without even flinching. By the rough-and-ready color charts, her shields didn't even lose more than 25.  
"Then the nuke, which Sam managed to drop practically up their asses, but _that_ didn't take her shields by more than a third, either.  
"Following this she launches her own fighters, and those frickin' tricked-out Lilim decimate our entire 10th Fighter Squadron, save for a handful. You pull 'em back, and it takes us almost 90 of our point-defense capability to finally hose them all. In the meanwhile, long-range comms are lost. Not that they'd have done much good—as you know, communication have been on the blink ever since the Lowardian ship de-spaced in the system. What a surprise.  
"And finally, allow me to remind you that she then proceeded to pump no less than _three_ torpedoes at us _in a single volley._ This from more than twice the range of any previously recorded plasma attacks, and half again the speed. We dodge one until it sputters, we eat one, and we play with that last one until you, Sam, and Steph pull off a nice bag of miracles."  
Donahue crossed his arms and sat back in his seat. "And mind you, they'll do this all again as soon as we get back into range.  
"I don't know about the rest of you, but it _sure_ sounds to me like this sumbitch could take on a couple battlefleets of our guys—especially if she had her engines."  
Grimacing, Menke fingered the exposed muzzle of his pistol where it sat on his belt. "But we have to do something. If this ship gets out of the system, God knows what she'll do."  
Nobody spoke, until Deville said quietly, "Yes, sir."  
Menke tapped a key on his command board repeatedly, trying to relieve the tension in his body. Then he stopped. The commander of a combat vessel could show a lot of emotions, but nervousness was not one of them.  
"Don," he said, turning to his second-in-command, Control first Perkins. "Options."  
He looked back at him. They both knew how short a list it would be.  
"One. We do nothing. Wait here and hope that somebody comes by on a standard run. Tell them what's up, have them call in support. Hope that whatever's wrong with the Lowardian's engines, they don't get them fixed until we have time to muster a fleet the size of Jesus and tackle her.  
"Two. We run. Try to get enough distance between us to gate out on a different vector than the one the 'Wardian's guarding." Perkins stopped. "But that's not an option, because there _are_ no other vectors. The only inhabited system within a thousand light-years is New Plymouth, and to get there, we need to go"—he pointed at the FOC display, where the single, massive, blinking red dot was shown prominently—"through that."  
"Three." Lieutenant Perkins wrapped his arms around himself and closed his eyes. "We hit them. We go in with everything we have, and hope for a miracle."  
Menke looked at Perkins, his voice weary. "And your recommendation, Lieutenant?"  
There was a moment of silence. Then he coughed convulsively. When he finally spoke, it was with a tired, raspy voice.  
"I think we've about gone through our quota of miracles for the day." He coughed again, and then subsided.  
"But . . . I also think that hoping for a miracle is better than no hope at all."  
Menke nodded.  
Then he looked around the bridge, and stood.  
"Make ready what you can, people. In twenty minutes, we move. I'll be in my quarters . . . " He picked up a numerical data pad and started to walk quickly from the bridge. "Adding up our miracle."  
He exited, and the pressure-sealing hatch slipped quietly shut.

* * *

Thousands of kilometers away, the gargantuan, menacing, dark-hued figure of the Lowardian behemoth awaited their decision.

* * *

"My ass you do! Let me see your sleeves!"  
Corporal Tony Palomino put down his cards and lifted both hands above his waist, holding them out in the air with a grin. "Nothin' but air, Boursey!"  
"Aw . . . fuck you, man." Groaning, Warrant Officer Taz Bourse picked up his billfold and shucked off five bills, balled them up one by one, then pitched them at Palomino. "God . . . damned . . . mother . . . fucking . . . scammer . . . "  
"You sure swear an awful lot for a career ah–feec–er, Boursey. You sure your mama would like that?"  
"No, but I got something _else_ that _your_ mama likes a _whole_ lot, asshole . . . "

* * *

"Hot and ready, Scoundrel?" Major Sarah Hathcock flicked the "Test" toggle on her helmet's HUD twice, then picked it up and began climbing the ladder to her Javelin spaceplane.

Her pilot, Major David "Scoundrel" Huntington, looked up at her and smiled. He tightened the last strap on his flight suit and scrambled up into the front seat of the plane, then slipped inside. A flight deck attendant wheeled the ladder away.  
"Come one, weenies." He muttered up at the high ceiling, above which, he knew, the _Winterborn's_ bridge was located. "Just give us a chance . . . "

* * *

"Load in!"  
"Locked!"  
"And . . . _armed._" The chief watch officer in charge of the deck 9 equipment preparedness slapped the key to activate the tube and flood it with helium, providing a safe, clean atmosphere for the launch.  
"Next one!"  
"Load in!"  
"Locked!"  
"Armed!"  
The first loading assistant lifted the loading tongs again. The watch officer looked over the row of armed torpedoes, taking a quick count. They'd been given a strict time window of fifteen minutes to work with, and they had to be finished by the time they battened down and returned to their G-seats for a burn.  
A dozen more, and they would be ready.

* * *

_"Attention, all hands."_  
Commander Blair Menke released the mike switch for a moment to clear his throat. Then he mopped his neck with the edge of his uniform.  
_"This is your Commander."  
_ Once more, he hesitated. Then, wavering but bitterly firm, he forged ahead.  
_"I am addressing the ship as a whole to inform you of the actions we are now taking, to ensure victory and eventual success in this engagement, and to safeguard the lives of our fellow warriors."_  
Too formal. Have to relax.  
_"At 1400 hours today, as you know . . . we met in combat with a Lowardian ship of unknown type. Shots were exchanged, and we fell back out of range to escape her fire. We have been considering our choices now, and have decided on a course of action."_  
Around the ship, heads turned away from their tasks, eyes looked up at the loudspeakers. A deck of cards fell from a pair of hands.  
_"This . . . unknown vessel is of a kind we have never seen before, and possesses extremely potent weapons and defenses. She is a target of very high priority for the security of the UN, GJ and the Earth, maybe a higher priority than we've ever seen.  
_ _"As such, she cannot be ignored.  
_ _"The most prudent course of action would be to abandon this area, and retreat to a location where reinforcements can be gathered. However, circumstances have rendered this impossible. The enemy ship has positioned herself, either by chance or by intent, directly in line of the vector-path we would need to take in order to escape this area by Gate travel.  
_ _"Nor can we speak with FLEETCOM remotely. In the contact with the enemy, our long-range communications array was disabled. Repairs have been deemed to be unfeasible. Also, the Lowardian ship seems to be equipped with some kind of jamming mechanism that is capable of blocking our transmissions even if we had a working signal broadcaster._  
In the fighter bay, a dozen pilots—the last survivors of the 10th Fighter Squadron—concentrated on the words with a single thought on all of their minds. _Let us hit them . . ._  
_"With these facts in mind, we have made the decision to assault the enemy in the best means we can, with every weapon at our disposal."_  
Four gunner's mates slapped their last round into its loading tube, switched it hot, then, as one, sprinted for their G-seats to strap in.  
_"The abilities already shown by the enemy ship have made it clear that . . . any conventional attack would be futile. With this in mind, we have crafted a strategy which the senior bridge officers and myself believe will allow us to utterly and completely destroy the Lowardian attacker."_  
It was inevitable. A massive, unruly, spirited cheer immediately rose from the throats of every man and woman aboard the _Winterborn._ They cried out their joy as one that they might be able to strike back at those who would crush them . . . and their gratitude that they had been given the chance.  
Hearing, Menke paused. Then he clicked the microphone back on and said:  
_"Don't cheer yet."_

* * *

The first step was simple. Every fighter the _Possible_-class cruiser _Winterborn_ carried was launched.  
Wave after wave of Kukri interceptors shot into space. Then bombers, dozens of them. Then a swarm of Locusts, filling the space around the _Winterborn_ in a protective sphere. Finally, the few remaining attack boats of the 10th squadron: sleek, powerful weapons platforms that could turn on a dime, crewed by the most elite pilots in the Global Justice Navy.  
The fighters formed up and began a flight plan directly toward the Lowardian cruiser, which sat motionless, deceptively placid.  
They flew straight and unerring. To the man, not one of them altered their course by a meter. Arrowing in for their target, they surged forward like a silent and lethal tide.  
Behind them, the _Winterborn_ rose looming.  
When they reached ten thousand kilometers away from the unmoving behemoth, she attacked, and the _Winterborn_ began to move.  
As a never-ending tide of Lowardian Lilim poured out into the inky space surrounding the attacking ship, and bands of intensely bright light slowly started to gather around her hull, the _Winterborn_ jetted her engines to their full, overload-prone capacity. One second . . . two seconds . . . three . . . four . . . and then, quite suddenly, they cut out. She coasted forward on inertia alone, as her fighters flew ahead in a dark, seething mass.  
Then, first one, then several attitudinal thrusters flared up, spotting the _Winterborn's_ hull with sharp, piercing lights. Slowly, she angled forward, until finally she had reversed her direction: bridge, weapons, and bays backward; engines, cold and inactive, in front.  
She had just reached her position when the Lowardian ship fired.  
The flaming, unbelievably intense ball of blue and red flame appeared and lanced away in a barely perceptible instant. But the streaks of light decorating the sides of the ship didn't disappear; they barely shortened while she launched another torpedo into the night, and then a third.  
The _Winterborn_ continued forward unwavering. Her fighters refused to flinch.  
Forward, forward, forward—and the first of the plasma shots slammed into the crowd of fighters, liquefying five immediately and crippling ten more as it carved through their ranks.  
The second torpedo hits seconds afterward, destroying another dozen fighters, including two of the 10th Squadron gunboats. Then the third shot, which claimed 8 fighters and six fully loaded spacebombers.  
The scene was quiet for several heartbeats, then the Lowardian fired again.

* * *

"Blue One, this is Shooter One. Break, break."  
"Roger that, command! Breaking formation." Major Huntington slapped his helmet happily, giving a whoop of joy and twirling his comm switch to the local channel with his other hand. "All units, abandon formation! Spread out and do what you can! Good hunting, boys. Tenth, you know what to do."  
The majority of the fighters and spaceplanes swept away from their tight grid formation, splitting off into space and forming up for attack runs on the Lowardian ship.  
However, the remaining ten planes of the 10th Squadron kept their course locked, straight ahead.  
With the five nuclear weapons silently coasting along beside them.

* * *

Commander Menke stood unblinking, addressing the busy field-of-combat display without a word or a flinch.  
Nobody spoke any warnings or status updates on the three incoming plasma torpedoes. He could see them as well as they could.  
One last time he checked the numbers on the small data pad lying next to his seat. If the timing on the attack wasn't perfect . . . if they didn't reach the enemy at precisely the right moment after the 10th Squadron fighters did . . .  
Then he shook his head to clear it and strapped himself into his chair for the high-G maneuvers. Strongly, he called, "Lieutenant Swift, the controls are yours."  
Technically, weapons were always under the direct control of the senior weps officer. But Deville said nothing. The Kinetic guns were no longer weapons now; they were navigational tools.  
The torpedoes flashed on the screen—collision alarms warbled from the computer—  
—and Swift slammed her finger down on a control, as the ship exploded.

Huntington turned his gaze away reluctantly from the alien cruiser that had been growing on his screen when he saw the flash with his peripheral vision. With quick fingers, he brought his nav screen up to show the view from his plane's rear camera.  
It appeared just in time to show the _Winterborn_ emit another blinding flash of light, and stumble forward like an avalanche. It looked slow, but Huntington knew how accurate that was—at these distances, she would need to be moving at hundreds of kilometers an hour to appear to be moving so quickly on his screen.  
A third time she jumped, and Huntington at last saw what was happening.  
She was firing her Kinetic cannon straight down the axis of her flight, directly behind her. Her recoil was smashing her forward with incredible power.

Spitting blood, Menke swore as loudly as he could. Bridge discipline scarcely mattered at this point. "Talk to me!"  
"The gun's ruined, Cap'n." Deville said breathlessly. He sounded strained. Broken rib, maybe. "Stress was too much. I knew it wouldn't last long. The damn thing isn't made to fire more than one shell at a time—and taking the dampeners off-line surely didn't help."  
"Commander!" Lieutenant Donahue gave a startled cry. "That last one wasn't enough, sir! Plasma compensating—it's correcting its course!"  
"Brace for imp—"  
The torpedo burrowed into the _Winterborn_ head-on, with enough kinetic energy to rock the entire ship.  
But Menke knew that the concave rear "bell" of a _Possible_-class cruiser UN-GJ combat vessel was by far the strongest point. Hardened under laser furnaces, dozens of meters thick, and coated in a meter-thick layer of reflective iridium, the surface of the ship that was designed to focus the energies of the main engines could take an enormous beating.  
"Burning through . . . inner hull pierced, sir. Plasma is dying out."  
The evacuation of all personnel and purging of the atmosphere in every one of the fifty lower decks had taken surprisingly little time, once the crew members there had learned what was going to happen.

* * *

_"Taking fire, sir! We're hit! We–"_  
Huntington cursed venomously. He didn't have to wonder why his wingman had suddenly cut off his transmission; the windows of his jet provided ample room to view the sudden eruption of space-borne destruction.  
Another flickering light snapped through space, and the gunboat flying left guard disappeared in a conflagration that caused Huntington to jump in surprise.  
He swore again, and hit his comm.

* * *

"Blair, the fighters are taking fire!" Donahue stabbed a finger at the main screen. Two of the green lights signifying the boats of the 10th Squadron had winked out. As Menke watched, another followed.  
"Looks like the 'Wardian figured it out. They're picking them off with laser fire."  
Menke breathed through his nose, emotionless. "Have we lost any nukes yet?"  
"No, sir."  
Another light blinked out.

* * *

Silently watching his viewports, Major Huntington refused to wince as yet another of his squadron mates died in a blaze of heat and fuel.  
Locking his stick on autopilot, he released the controls and reached into his flight vest.  
Removing a cigar, he took the time to light it and exhale slowly; looking upward at his canopy and marveling at how many hundreds of regulations he must be breaking.  
Without looking down, he reached out for his comms mike and keyed it on. Softly, he said into it:  
"Hold course."

* * *

"Sir, they're getting close to the trigger point. Should I tell the Kukris and the others to break off?" Perkins, Menke observed, was having an attack of conscience.  
"You know better than that, Don," Menke said quietly. "If that bastard's close-in guns aren't occupied, she'll fry the 10th in a heartbeat.  
He watched as Perkins rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. He sighed. "Yeah, I know."  
Then another light blinked out, and he vomited on the flight deck.

* * *

It was only when the fifth of his men had died that Huntington found the strength to look out his viewport and wonder that he was still alive.  
"Distance, Sarah?" he asked gently.  
His headset crackled with the reply. "200," his weapons officer told him.  
"Right."  
Moving deliberately, Huntington moved his hand up to his console and touched keys until he had selected a no-security broadcast mode.  
Then, eyes dead, he stared straight ahead and activated his headset mike.  
"Heads up, you son of a bitch," he said. "This is from the Tenth."

* * *

"The activation point's approaching," said Lieutenant Swift.  
Menke turned to look at Deville. He nodded back, "Ready to send."  
Keeping his eyes on the main monitor, Menke squeezed his fists until he cut into himself.  
"Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . "  
"Forgive me," Menke said under his breath.  
"Activate."  
Deville tapped a single key, and five 20-megaton tactical nuclear weapons detonated simultaneously.  
The _Winterborn_ rocked only the tiniest bit to salute the passing of enough matter to raze a moon, and seven of the bravest men in the race.

* * *

The Lowardian's shields staggered and flared orange.

* * *

Dimly, Menke could hear Perkins bellowing into a microphone—"Abort, abort! Wave off your shit and get clear! All fighters, abort attack and clear area!"  
Only the handful of spaceplanes that had been distant enough to survive the blast heard him, and swooped away.  
"Distance closing," Donahue told him, voice quivering only slightly—making an effort, in the end, to maintain the calm he had always kept before. "Collision . . . imminent."  
_I should say something to the crew._  
Menke lifted one finger, even touched the intercom button, but . . . then lowered it again, and moved to switch it off. There was nothing to say.  
Then he frowned, and forced himself past the fog that was cluttering his ears to hear what was coming through the bridge speakers—coming from the other end of the intercom. From the crew.  
Singing.

_  
_ _…__Dry your eyes and quietly bear this pain with pride_

_For heaven shall remember the silent and the brave_

_And promise me they will never see, the fear within our eyes_

_We will give strength to those who still remain._

Menke closed his eyes, and behind the singing could hear Deville saying, "All five warheads ready . . . positioned? Roger that. Signal prepped . . . ready to initiate five seconds after contact . . . "

_  
_ _And in the fury of this darkest hour_

_We will be your light_

_You've asked me for my sacrifice_

_And I am Winter born_

_Without denying, a faith is come_

_That I have never known_

_I hear the angels call my name_

_And I am Winter born…_

"Contact!"  
"Light it up!"

As the _Winterborn_ slammed down butt-first on the hull of the alien cruiser, her engines finally ignited.  
Flashing yellow, red, purple, then snapping and flashing out of existence entirely, the enemy ship's shields sputtered and died.

_Hold your head up high-for there is no greater love_

_Think of the faces of the people you defend_

_And promise me, they will never see the tears within our eyes_

_Although we are men, with mortal sins, angels never cry._

"Firing."  
Deville touched the red fire button, and sent the signal to activate all five of the nuclear warheads that had been placed in the chamber of the cracked drive chamber. In less than a millisecond, every one of the bombs received the command and pressed shut five tiny micro switches, deep in their hearts.  
As they exploded, they funneled downward, the engine cone of the ship acting as a single, massive shaped charge, directing the brunt of the blast directly into the defenseless Lowardian cruiser.

* * *

The seven remaining Kukri fighters, the only survivors of the Battle of the _Winterborn,_ activated their Gate drives as soon as they reached an adequate velocity, and returned to Earth with a tale of hope.


	2. 02 Red Queen

_Remember, Caesar. Thou art mortal._

There is a person who transcends her own existence.  
A woman who exemplifies the very meaning of her creed.  
Brutal but merciful, quick, yet powerful, strong yet graceful—calculating but with a slashingly limitless imagination.  
She is everything that her people strive to be. And She is better.  
The ultimate quintessence of martial perfection, She is a woman, but far more—indeed, She is Woman. She is not flawless—She has taken the realm of ability to a new level, and what was once Flaw becomes Feature, what was once efficient became beautiful.  
She is a legend in her own time.  
And every mind in her culture, her own including, believes in one thing if they believe at all. They believe She can do anything, even defy her own end .

But they are wrong.

She leapt forward, and rolled.  
As She fell through the air, a sound reached her, touching off an automatic reaction She was aware of only after it had happened; before She hit the ground, She snapped her arms up, caught her weight, and _pushed_—hurled herself into a flip that carried her through ten feet of air.  
She apexed and was beginning her descent by the time the streak of plasma scored the ground below her, a direct hit on where She had been.  
But they were too slow, of course,  
Landing with a sideways tumble, She came up facing backwards. The weapon that was suddenly in her hand gutted the Lowardian before he could see more than a blue-on-white blur.  
Her own senses, augmented by the suit's sensors, made it almost unfair; the enemy that was creeping from behind her would have done better to attempt to ambush a sun.  
Kicking the wall beside her at the same time She dropped her shields to increase her traction, She spun herself through the air, pin wheeled, and landed on the Lowardian's shoulders. She let her weight go, described an arc to the ground, and, with the alien's head held between her legs, catapulted him against the wall.  
The Cheerleader-turned-hero rocked to her feet, twisted her rifle off her shoulders, and with one motion slammed the side of it into the alien's skull. There was a sickening crunch.  
The impact activated the weapon's built-in light.  
She shoved away from the dead alien so hard that She fell backwards. The rifle's ion illuminator, suddenly bright in the dim corridor, spotlighted the alien that had been approaching from behind. The Lowardian instinctively covered his eyes.  
Half a second later, the woman flew five feet from a prone start and landed a blow so heavy that it penetrated clear to the other side of the alien's body.  
She left her _Erinyes_-armored fist impaled, holding the red-attired Lowardian upright; with her other hand, She tossed the rifle over his head, caught it behind, and with a sharp tug, pulled as hard as She could. The long weapon spun against the alien's head and lanced twenty feet through the air, light whirling around the walls wildly, to smash into the last Lowardian and kill him instantly.  
Slowly withdrawing her blood-soaked arm, the woman known as Kim Possible let the body of everything She fought against fall to the hard, polished ground.

She ran.  
Cresting the corner of the coiling passageway, the path opened up before her straight and true; a hundred meters of open space.  
Lowering her head, She began to accelerate. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty miles an hour. Forty. She was a blur against the unlit corridor. Forty-five.  
She was still accelerating when the throughway ended. Unable to stop, She leapt forward and planted both of her legs squarely into the flat wall of the ninety-degree turn. A quick mental command locked the knee joints of her battle suit.  
There was a deafening _clang_ as She impacted, and She felt the effect ripple through her body. She shook it off, came to her feet with a kip-up, spun off the wall and kept running.  
Idly, She noted the five-inch-deep dent in the forged steel wall.  
She kept running.

At least five hundred meters on either side. A thousand, from end to end—the chamber would have been large enough to house an airfield, and high enough for the planes to get airborne, too.  
The Cheerleader looked around again, peering through the small viewing-window in the chamber door. The gloomy, somber moon shined its corpse-grey beams through the round gap in the roof of the arid space; it played a morbid pattern onto the device that lay below it, in the exact center of the room and the only thing within.  
_At least I won't have to look around for it,_ She thought with a wry sarcasm.  
Briefly, She mourned her missing companion, Ron. Probably He wouldn't have had anything to contribute to the solution less tactical problem; but He would at least have had an appropriately morbid wisecrack to lighten the moment.  
But—especially now—there was not a chance in hell that GJ would have let the mind of Ron, his genius long ago unlocked by repeated exposure to the Attitudinator, savior of the war almost as many times as her, fall into the hands of the enemy. Certainly not for the sake of her amusement.  
_Parameters: to obtain access to a certain enemy-held objective point. Objective is situated in the center of a circular chamber with radius of approx. 500 meters, and twice that from the floor to the domed ceiling. Area containing multiple ingress/egress points, numerous possible sources of fire, and no cover. Enemies are to be considered, for all intents and purposes, limitless._  
The voice of Wade, harkening from deep within the expanses of her memory, came bubbling up in her. _What do YOU do, Kim?_  
But not even Wade would have been sadistic enough to suggest a scenario like this. And if he had, the Cheerleader knew what the correct answer would have been: retreat and wait for GJ reinforcements.  
Reinforcements. Now, _that_ was likely. An airstrike would be nice. Maybe a squadron or two of mounted orbital GJ shock troops. _Why stop there? Let's nuke the place into dirt. Then nuke the dirt._  
She shook herself back to reality. The only thing within a thousand lightyears of this place was her and the most sadistic race in the galaxy.  
Everybody else had more sense than to approach the home of the most hated race in the universe.  
She slapped herself on the side of the head with her rifle and bodily forced her thoughts back to the situation. Kneeling down wearily, She rested her chin on the butt of her weapon and closed her eyes.  
_What now?_

**It is a commonly-adopted attitude that it was Kim Possible's ignorance of the tactical situation—primarily, the true disposition and strength of the force arrayed against her—that influenced her actions, and had she known of these things, her decision would have been different.  
This is unlikely. The question was one of mindset, not of odds.** _All Possibilities - The Real War, p. 173_

Had an observer been standing directly in front of the small access door to the Anti-Matter Cannon, they would have observed nothing at all out of the ordinary up until the moment that the cheerleader entered.  
Then, of course, the observer would have died.  
There had never before been documented a horizontal jump that spanned twenty feet. That was acceptable. It only increased her element of surprise when the Cheerleader slammed through the air like a rocket, shattered the tiny observation window, and landed in a long roll two dozen meters into the chamber.

_Must have been rigged analog,_ She thought as She heard the shaped-charge explosives set around the door explode inward, less than a second after her passage but already far too late.  
She jinked left, right, then sectored diagonally across the floor in a smooth motion that covered ten feet in an instant. Then it was pure instinct that made her drop to the floor, and saved her from taking more than a touch of the massive ball of plasma.  
She would never know what made her keep moving, sliding sideways along the ground after She had already dodged—but it saved her life. The cluster of mini-munitions slammed down beside her, and threw her body cart wheeling through the air, eating up the shields on her battle suit with the blast. She lived.  
A slap to her waist activated the one-time shield booster, and a hum emitted from her suit as the battery slung around her hip infused her with power, restoring her protective energy field. The indicator atop the battery ticked down.  
Running purely on secondary senses, her rifle pickled off three, four, five individual shots as if it had a mind of its own. It was only after that She saw what he had shot: three, four, five SpecOps Lowardian's, they're matte black armor riddled with bleeding holes.  
She sprinted forward, fast enough to elude a stream of plasma rifle fire and to spoof the tracking system of the motion-seeking cannon in the ball turret in the ceiling of the chamber. It whirred around, confused.  
Twisting left, then right, She let two kinetic bursts of power glance off of her at angles. Then She juked right again, barely enough to avoid the triple burst of airborne plasma.  
Spinning around and backpedaling, She snapped off teneleventhirteeneighteentwenty bursts from her modified assault rifle, and twenty-five moving figures took the armor-piercing rounds and died.  
She blinked. Looking around for the first time, She saw her enemy.  
Already there were too many to count; and they were still streaming out from the myriad hatches along the huge walls.  
Spin. Index the shot in less than the time it took for her heart to beat. Break away a clean three-round burst from the hip.  
The rocket—_the rocket? Where did they get rockets?_—was pattered with bullets and detonated in a fiery plume, a dozen feet away and not far enough.  
Her shields diminished to a hair's-breadth, She tapped at the booster-battery again and topped off her energy buffer.  
Running more, in a spectacularly rapid zigzag pattern. Like a hummingbird. They couldn't compensate. The volley of plasma and more antiquated rifle fire, coming now from nearly a hundred individual sources, skipped through the air and missed.  
With a burst of speed, She halved the distance to the center of the room. Her magazine dropped away and was replaced.

Distance, distance!  
She slid under a well-aimed salvo of energy and had enough speed to come back to her feet without stopping. But She stopped regardless, two seconds later—the enemy was getting too eager. She dropped both hands quickly to her belt, primed two grenades, then gave a vicious whirl and flung them. Fast as a darting minnow, She had another two, primed and in the air before the first had hit the ground. Then, without waiting, She kicked up her rifle from where She had dropped it and raked a stream of fire across the approaching mass of her antagonists.  
She turned and was running again. Scarce seconds afterward, the grenades exploded onetwothreefour—  
_kerBLAM!_  
Dozens of separate screams filled the air. The fragmentation grenades that the many fallen Lowardian's were armed with had detonated into arching spheres of shrapnel.  
Four more feet, and She had reached the device.

It was amazingly innocuous; a rectangular box, less than four feet tall, and shaped as a console. It was mounted on the ground with a large, fluted base. A simple input screen was affixed to the front.  
A harsh pummeling of fire slapped into her from behind. The visual indicator for her shields broke in half.  
She let the force of the blast knock her forward, and She carried it into a roll to absorb the shock. Her hand hovered hesitantly over the activator for the shield booster, and then moved away.  
The console was directly in front of her.  
Suddenly, outrageously careful, She touched one key; another. Tentatively, several in combination.  
Another burst of fire slammed against her. Reflexively, She slipped to the side, crabbing her legs swiftly.  
A white-hot stream of plasma roared into the console, shattering and melting the controls beyond recognition.  
Furious, She bellowed an expletive and leaped over the device, just ahead of a cris-crossing web of fire that screamed out of nowhere, sizzling the air and raising a nerve-splitting _SCREEEE!_ of tortured atmosphere.

_Fool, Antaeus! Tell your men to watch their fire! The cannon's antimatter loads are bare meters underground!  
It's shielded!  
But the barrel may carry a flash, and it is not. . ._

With a whip-crack motion of her arm, She pitched the clip of rifle ammunition into the belly of the alien.  
Holding the rifle with in her left hand, She snap-fired a burst, and the clip flared to life with a _crump_. The alien staggered back, dropping the glowing plasma staff and holding his stomach.  
A new variety of armored Lowardian's had begun to surface, among the never-ending swarm of ordinary troops; silvery, with an iridescent sheen; wielding swords and with shields twice as strong as that of the common Lowardian's. _These must be the elite warriors_.  
A ripping plasma streak carved her shields away and seared the reflective coating on her torso black. She fell to a kneel, surrounded by a hail of fire, and wordlessly pounded the flood key for the shield-recharger again. She risked a quick glance at the indicator; a single charge remained.  
Another of the Warriors was charging her, tipped with his sword. She faked to the left, then broke right blindingly fast and dropped to one knee, sweeping the warriors legs away. She followed it up with the butt of her rifle to his neck. Even as its owner did, the sword burst on the ground and died.  
Fast—fast!—She dropped her hands down and spun herself around, planting one leg into the face of the next Warrior. Throwing her weight downward She regained her feet, then slammed her body against the alien, checking him with her shoulder; he fell backwards with his own sword buried in his chest.  
The Cheerleader danced back once more, barely avoiding the arching reach of a hacking sword. Another swing, and She ducked under it, then—  
—took a heavy jolt of plasma, as a streak of fire burst against her. Her shields disappeared.  
The sword descended upon her with a wicked thrust.  
Close enough to melt tempered iron, her reflexes and training failed her; her life depended on gravity alone as She crumpled limply, falling as fast as She could move. The beam of energy arrowed like a lance a half-inch above her face, and sank two feet deep into the metal console behind her.  
Sparks and flashes, then a tremendous groaning sound began to fill the room.

It was opening.  
The Cheerleader rolled over, panting. The face of every one of the army of Lowardian's seemed transfixed, staring.  
Slowly, ponderously, the metal convolutions surrounding the box were beginning to unfold. Hinges, revealed, swung creakingly open.  
The console folded away under the floor. Its fluted underpinnings began to iris upward, pressing a huge, ornate, gigantically reinforced column towards the sky.  
And as it passed the Cheerleader, lying on the ground breathing heavily, nobody noticed as She slipped the object off her belt and into the gaping hole in the center of the barrel.  
All eyes were on the device as it slid upward, upward. Towards the round, open gap in the ceiling, where the stars were winking noiselessly.  
Higher and higher it crept.  
Unobserved, the Cheerleader examined her wounds quietly. The entire upper portion of the helmet Wade had custom-made for this mission was fused together; the surface of her faceplate was completely melted. The visor's built-in HUD was going haywire, the mini-pic of Ron in the lower right corner fizzing over with static at irregular intervals. Tiny whirring noises sounded continuously as the on-board computer shorted out and the servos jerked back and forth.  
And the giant, imposing device rose higher.

She considered activating it herself with a grenade, but it wouldn't be necessary. The cannon was obviously beginning a full firing sequence; and the antimatter shells would do far more than She ever could.  
The barrel had, at last, locked into place at its full extension. It was pointed, straight as doom, directly through the wide hole in the roof; pinpricks of light provided a soft counterpoint to its brutal, pitiless shape.  
Loud, crackling sounds fried that air. The energy in the titanic storage banks below the surface of the lair were charging the weapon with enough power to level a world.  
And the air cracked with energy.  
Lying back against the hard metal floor, the Cheerleader relaxed, letting the tension drain from her limbs. It was getting hard to breathe. Probably the near-miss from the plasma sword had enflamed her lungs, filling the bronchial tubes with superheated air. Or maybe the levels of sub-electronic energy that was starting to saturate the chamber were affecting her body.  
It didn't matter.  
Contentedly, She allowed her shields to drain, noticing the sparks that were beginning to touch off between the field and the surrounding air. Reactions, probably.  
It wouldn't make any difference; but She wanted to see the end. Feeling something within her suddenly give way, She gasped; but her suit, like a full-body bandage, held her together.  
Now, so much power had been transferred to the device that motes of dust were being flash-evaporated as they hit it. Long arcs of blue and white energy slanted through the air from the tip of the weapon to the ground. There was very little time left.  
But there was one last thing to do.  
_Let the old fellow come now! He shall find me—_slowly, achingly, She pushed herself to her side, then onto her knees. Drawing on every inch of strength She could muster, She rose, at last, painfully upright. She staggered—_on my feet—_and curled her hand around the grip of her rifle—_sword in hand—_  
Through wracked with pain, She raised the rifle to her shoulder, and gave one final salute to her enemies, now gathered on a balcony above the firing chamber.  
Then, just before She fell, She looked upward at the glowing, radiant streams of energy that were coursing along the weapon, ready to fire, and She smiled.  
For only the second time in her life, Kimberly Anne Possible found peace.  
And then _light—_

**The weapon had, after all, been designed to ravish a planet. The charge of antimatter that was fired weighed in at nearly five tons, and was supercharged to a velocity Very Close to Light (VCL).  
When it collided with the object that had been placed in the barrel, it scarcely mattered that the object was little more than a prototype **_**Erinyes**_** battle suit shield-storage battery (**_see page 592, "Mark 289 Recharger"; also page 867, "The Later Stages of Erinyes"_). **Anything at all would have ruined a firing sequence that was meant to be unobstructed.  
The expected occurred. An explosion of sufficient energy to completely annihilate the military installation, and the weapon itself. It would have been a devastating loss to the Lowardian invasion force, even had the energy surge not then flashed down through the chamber of the weapon, setting off the entire magazine of antimatter below the base.  
Global Justice sensors observed the final, cataclysmic blast, and relayed the readings back to headquarters. There, the pictures of Lowardia turning into a massive, swirling ball of toxic emissions were broadcast over the subnet to every home, every school, every base and public gathering place in the Free World.  
An entire species rejoiced, even as they mourned the loss of their champion.** _All Possibilities – The Real War, p. 186_


	3. 03 Ghosts of Memory

They were a sea of faces. The remaining free peoples of the world represented in a singularity of humanity. They had once been farmers, grocers, police officers, doctors, chauffeurs, soldiers, delivery boys and politicians. They had once been disparate; they were now rendered equal. And they were all watching her.

The cold rain was wet and bitter as it alighted on her skin, prickling it into gooseflesh, nesting in her hair. Her breath steamed out in front of her, turning her into an olive-skinned dragon. She paced slowly back and forth, looking into their faces, remembering. There, the soldier who found a puppy in the shattered remains of Go City the week before. Behind him, the woman who had given everything she had in order to help feed them all. To the side, the man who had taken the bullet meant for her. Even the Colonel waited on her, his broad shoulders telling of the pride he felt for her, even if he mouth had never been able to convey the words. They all watched. And waited.

The Colonel nodded at her from the side. She cleared her throat of cold-induced rust, and she began.

"She was a hero. There is no better way to say it. Even before the Upperton Incident put her center stage, before the drama, she was a hero."

"I knew her before she went that day. But it is to my shame that I never called her a friend. Maybe it was out of petty jealous, teenage rivalry, insecurity, angst. I was focused on me, she was always focused on others and I berated, belittled and ostracized her for it. She was the better person."

The words are soulful and proud, exhaled on an exhaust of breath that belies the passion with which they are spoken. "At first, in the beginning, she was more focused on helping those who were in need after the Incident. There were thousands, tens of thousands of refugees from Go City and other afflicted cities, towns. But when the first counter-stroke from Global Justice was decimated, she knew she could no longer afford to shirk her given role, her destiny."

"I remember finding her sitting in the high school library the night before she went, staring out through the bay windows. The high school itself was then being used as a staging point for triage and other necessities. She had snuck off, maybe to prepare herself, maybe to get away from the oppressive weight of human tragedy. I remember seeing her from behind, her red hair partially hiding her face. Responsibility had settled on her shoulders, and it weighed on her. She saw me in the glass and turned to face me. She was not afraid."

Her eyes tear slightly, trying to clear themselves of an offending raindrop that isn't there. "I asked her why she had to go, why her? She smiled at me, that shy half-smile. She said to me, 'Bonnie, that's exactly why I have to; because everyone's thinking the same thing, 'why me?' Unless they're crazy, no one wants to die. They'd be much happier if this had never happened, if the Lowardians were to be snuffed out like so much smoke.'"

"'But what if they all said, 'Oh gee, good always wins over evil, why don't I let someone else go and fight, and die?' No one would fight, would they?'"

"We were both quiet for a moment after that; she to her thoughts and me to my growing understanding of precisely why so many people viewed her as a hero. But still, I asked: 'Why?' Her face was serious this time, no smiles, no twinkling green eyes, no humor. There was only responsibility and duty, honor and integrity in her face, manner and soul when she answered."

"'I go out there, Bonnie, thinking I'm fighting the good fight; that I represent the forces of good and justice and to protect the innocent, those who cannot protect themselves. Well and good. When it comes down to it, that's precisely why I'm there.'"

"'But when the death rays are blazing, and the plasma is flying, and maybe I'm bleeding and my friends are hurt, that's not why I do it.'"

"'I do it for my mother, my brothers, my sisters that never were, my daughters to be. My boyfriend, my teachers, my father, and my husband I never had. I do it for my friends and my enemies alike.'"

Her voice is furry now, emotional, but she refuses to be silenced as a hero walks in memory. "She said, 'But most importantly, Bonnie, most importantly I do it for the man beside me. I do it for the GJ agent in the ditch down a ways, with plasma blasts landing all around him. I do it for the policeman to my right, facing an unknowable evil all by himself. I do it for the friend who gave me a shoulder to lean on when I needed it.'"

"'You fight and, if necessary, you die, so they won't have to. You fight, desperate and confused though you may be, in the hopes that all the others might make it.'"

"'You fight for the agent to your right, the soldier to your left, the commander in front and the civilian behind. You could die, sure – you might.'"

"'But if you do…they might not. And that's a cause worth fighting for.'"

Her will is a palpable thing to the assembled throngs, her self-control iron-girded and dreadful. "I had never heard anyone talk like that, and I haven't since. Those were her words, and then she went out and joined. You've all seen the newsreels. When day breaks tomorrow fight for what you will, but remember those who came before." She stepped down off the make-shift stage and disappeared into the still crowd, chased by a haze of rain and the oncoming dark.


	4. 04 Preparation

The rain made a light, hypnotizing patter against the hard-baked mud, turning the deep-churned earth into a sludge of dirt and blood. In another time, another place, it might have been called calming, romantic. But here, it was a maddening reminder of their mortality. Because the Lieutenant knew it was killing them.

* * *

1st Lieutenant Bonnie Rockwaller reclined against the rock, inhaling the dusty scent of the underground passage. Corporal Adrena Lynn sat next to her, flipping plasticized playing cards into a pile. Despite their plastic coating, the cards had been soaked through to the core the day before, and the flayed edges pulled up bits of soil until it looked like she was playing with a dirtball. She finished the stack, then sighed and flopped back against the ground.  
"It's over, isn't it, Bon? First thing tomorrow."  
Rockwaller eyed the woman with her best look of disgust. It was a good look. She blanched ever so slightly, then continued unfettered.  
"I mean, it's true though, right? We're all dead!" Rockwaller just stared. "Well, I'm sorry! But it's going to happen whether I say it or not! And there's no goddamn wood to knock on around here, so don't bother checking. Unless maybe you count the head of our darling commander."  
Rockwaller broke her trance, looking away as if embarrassed. "He's a good man, Lynn. It's a bad time. Even for the good ones."  
"Well, begging your pardon, but bullshit. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't be here, and that's ALL I need to know. And don't call me that."  
Rockwaller grunted.  
Specialist Lode, the platoon's computer tech, plopped down beside them with a grin that betrayed in a heartbeat where he had been the day before. Or rather, where he hadn't been. What he hadn't seen. _Bastard_, Rockwaller thought halfheartedly, then immediately regretted it. It wasn't his fault that the leg had been just fractured enough to miss the patrol duty. He was lucky. Just a kid. He shouldn't be here. _None of us should_.  
Rockwaller, watched, painfully bemused, as Lode waved the item in his hand with glee. "Check it out, guys! I had no idea it was here! I thought it was just lost, dropped in the crash... something... but it was here all along! Stored along with the emergency cache!" He stopped moving long enough for Rockwaller to discern the gleaming object he held. "My trumpet!"  
Rockwaller remembered now. Lode had been a musician, one of a myriad of talents the younger man seemed to be able to produce at will.  
"What the hell are you going to do with a trumpet, Nerdlinger? Lock and load?" asked Lynn.  
"Oh, I know, I know I can't play it. Not here. We want until morning, at least, until they find us! But I found it! I can play it tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever I get a chance!"  
Rockwaller shared a look of pity with Lynn. If any of them lived through tomorrow, trumpets would be the last thing on their mind.  
The Colonel walked by, still in full armor, carrying his helmet. He must have been on sentry. He approached the trio.  
"You guys... everybody's counting and amalgamating ammunition. You three can be a group. Split it up, spread 'em out. Just like I taught…" The words choke off.  
He walked off. The three favored his back with a glare. "Bastard." Lynn said. "Does he think we can't handle this? Just because he's seen more combat than us, he thinks we don't know our asses from holes in the ground."  
She glanced at the others for support- Rockwaller, giving a noncommittal look of neutrality; Lode, just grinning as usual. "Oh, forget it. Let's do ammo."  
The three soldiers pulled out their weapons and dropped the clips. One-two-three. "Three full," Lynn said. He slid his last two spares from her battle harness, dropping them in the pile. She followed them with her last grenade, then worked the magazine free from her sidearm and deposited it. The others quickly added what they had.  
The final count was, to say the least, less than perfect. They had nine clips of the 12mm RunHard penetrators, only seven of them full. Four magnetic fragmentation grenades, three more pure concussion. A couple plasma charges for incendiary work. Lynn and Rockwaller had five clips of charger ammunition between the two of them, to be loaded in the pistols, and god knows where but Lode had found thirty-two static round for his shotgun. There were innumerable flares, several mass-sensor mines, and, of course, Rockwaller's sword. It was a far cry from the baton she used to twirl as a girl, she reflected as she twirled it around in her hand, but a damned sight more useful now.  
She clicked the switch a few times to make sure it still functioned, watching the glowing energy run down the metal like St. Elmos fire. She swirled the air a few times, and did a sharp riposte that plunged through the rock that Lynn leaned against, causing her to jerk forward in fright. "I can't believe you still have that damn thing," she muttered in irritation.  
Lode was more charitable, smiling as the custom-made weapon painted streaks of fire into his vision. "The Rock rolls again. She'd be proud of you."

* * *

The rest of the night passed quietly, in taut, tight, anticipation. Around midnight, Rockwaller rose and went to talk to the Colonel. She came back, hours later, leaned against his backrest, and fell into a deep, untroubled, practiced sleep.  
The birds chirped madly, as if they knew it was bothering the soldiers.  
"Feather-ridden peacock," Lynn muttered, making a reflexive motion to wipe sweat from her forehead. She arrested her hand a few inches from her faceplate. Times like this, no matter what the computer said, they were sure you could roast a pig inside one of the suits.  
That pigs were indeed roasting therein was an old, old joke, and one they didn't consider very funny in the at these 100-degree moments.  
Rockwaller shifted her rifle to lay across her knees, punching her system to run a diagnostic. Greengreengreenyellowgreenred. Not bad. The same, at least, as five minutes ago when she had run the previous diagnostic. Her jump jets had gone away and weren't coming back, and there wasn't much she could do about it, but otherwise, she had everything she needed.  
If it came to that, she would need nothing more for the plan.  
She tapped the particle transmitter on her belt. The PPE beeped. At least something was working right. "Colonel."  
"Colonel, this is Rockwaller. Hole one one is good to go."  
"What about yours?"  
"Sir, hole one one is-"  
"I know, I know. Never mind. What about- uh... the, ah, thing we discussed?"  
"It'll either happen or it won't. Pray we don't need it. Everything we can do is done."  
"They'll be there or they won't?"  
"That's about it. Just hope. And hope it's not necessary."  
"Pardon me, lieutenant, but that's not going to happen. Not even in my wildest dreams have I dreamt we can hold this position."  
"Just hope, sir. Anything can happen. If we get out of here, we'll have even worse problems to deal with."  
"What? What's that?"

"Finding a way to get you to dream about things wilder than trenches. Perhaps a little green-skinned somebody…" The words hung in the air. The comm channel snapped off abruptly from the other end.

_That'll shut him up_.  
She ran down the list in her mind, as she ran her eye and her hands down her body. Weapon cocked, locked, and sighted in. Clean enough to eat off of. Breastplate fitted. The pistols were snugged to her belt, the one she had borrowed off Private Winters cleaned and checked. Grenades attached, ammo secure. Sword sheathed. The detonator had been gone over by six separate men.  
She looked up. Now, it was just them. And the enemy.  
As if in response to her summons, a distant rumbling, like steel lightning, resonated in her earpiece.  
"Speak of the devil" she whispered, tracing the line of her blade with one finger.  
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Lynn let out a laugh.  
Rockwaller and Lode turned to stare at her. She grinned. "Don't you get it? The devil! It's the devil! Hell! It's the Devil! We're in hell!" She swept her hand in a massive circle, encompassing the air, the ground, all of their surroundings. "Don't you see? We're in hell!"  
Rockwaller froze, closing her eyes. Whisperingly, wordlessly, she let her finger run over the words engraved on her sword, speaking them without a voice.  
"AND WHERE HELL IS THERE MUST WE EVER BE".  
The roar grew louder, as she felt the second line, along the opposite side of the blade. "YET I COME NOT TO BRING PEACE, BUT A SWORD"  
A maddening grin coursed across her face as she swept up her sword, and spinning, rose in the air, her glimmering spike of light reflecting the sun like a shard of crystal, as she keyed onto the main channel and spoke the words recalled from days of long memory.  
"Come on, you bastards! You wanna live forever?"  
The tide roared, like a crashing wave.


	5. 05 Battle Joined

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.  
The Colonel had arranged the battle in a semi-circular firesack deployment, a layout that had been used for literally hundreds of years. Nothing fancy, just a scimitar-curving grouping of foxholes and trenches, thickly-laid and distributed in the order of battle. A hook on one end of the scimitar contained two of the three surviving ARVs, and the single heavily damaged light tank, all dug in hull-down through the heavy clay and grime of the earth. The configuration was simple, well-planned and executed, and tested innumerably by time and grizzly battles. It was a strong and effective, and a far cry from the myriad of subjects he used to teach at Middleton High School.  
But it was not a miracle.  
The swarm of Lowardians struck without ceremony and without needlessly complex tactics. They outnumbered the humans nearly ten to one, and were not disposed to over plan in any case. Number were numbers, and numbers worked.  
The first line, two hundred strong and composed of low-caste employed as shock-troops, swept over the human emplacements in moments. They closed the distance, grappling to get near enough to use their close-range and melee weapons, bellowing war-cries and lighting the air with bursts of energy fire, and upon reaching a line one hundred meters from the trenches, died.  
The soldiers, none of which had fired more than three shots, quietly recalibrated their scopes, took a moment to place weapons or comms in more convenient positions, and balefully eyed the next wave of Lowardians.  
The Colonel settled into his hole, watched the swarm of attackers sweep over a second invisible line, and spoke into his mike: "Light."  
Rockwaller pressed the button.  
Four hundred alien bodies, this time split roughly fifty-fifty between low-caste and high-caste Lowardian warriors, were hurtled into the air in a variety of pieces.  
The battle came, full speed and without mercy.  
Scarcely behind their ranks of still-warm dead, and through the billowing clouds of smoke and soot, the roaring tide smashed into the trench-line with the whip-crack ferocity of a striking snake. Blazing white-hot plasma down the field, they met a solid wall of doom and fate as the 44th Bridage, 1ID finally let loose their fire.  
The fortified vehicles added their own efforts, pouring the heavy rat-a-rat staccato of the heavy machine guns and the slower _ka-LAM! _of the tanks single cannon. The soldiers raked the charging line with the last of their ammunition, filling the sky with fire.  
Rockwaller had thrust her sword into the ground as a rally point, and eschewing the safety of the trench from which Lynn and Lode were slewing reams of fire downrange, she lanced streak after streak of DU and armor-piercing penetrators after the advancing hordes from a kneeling position she assumed in the loamy earth. She fired in short bursts, seeking out the heads of the taller warriors above the crowd when she could.

She cut two away from a squad-manned energy weapon, shot a third through the knees as it approached to take their place, and put the last five shots of the magazine into the hooded viewing-prism of an armored vehicle. Without pausing in her tirade, she let the clip fall about an inch before becoming impatient and knocking at aside with a fresh one, which she slammed into place. Laying a ceiling of fire over a group approaching her, she twisted into a roll, running a half-dozen steps before crumpling under an incoming barrage.

* * *

When it abated- momentarily- she revolved upright, continued the motion through her arm, and flipped a plasma pyrotechnic a dozen meters forward. She dropped again, falling barely under a hail of fire, counted a fast three, and was up and sprinting again as the grenade exploded, casting up a plume of smoke and dust. She was behind it and then through, firing as she ran, dropping figures in the mist one-two-three, floating spectres that haunted her as her gun jammed on a mis-feed, clacking harshly as she begun to turn to engage a new target; she finished the turn, accelerating into a savage pirouette, and hurled the rifle javelin-straight into a crowd of locust-swarming low-caste. One fell, the others turned inward in confusion, and her hands found the grip of her pistols and they were out, tracking two targets bam-bam-bam; six low-caste fell pocked with the charged neodymium, heart head gut-gut vessel chamber, and one hamstrung through both legs in an incredible lucky shot. _Luck? Was it luck?_  
_Was it ever?_  
She heard the roar and knew it, fell back rolling as her guns pivoted up and saw the two jets, smelled blood, and leapt forward like starving bloodhound. One, three, five shots missed, but then a shot took one in the wing and the next drilled through his wingmate's fuel port, just as one pistol clicked dryly and the other felt his beck and call and tracered the next shot, sheathing it in green flame that arced through the air, lighting the fog unexpectedly as she turned and was once again running. She cleared the edge of her mini-smokescreen, found herself fifty feet from the lines and the enemy already there. Her pistols reloaded. _Had she done that? No matter_, because they were working again, back and forth, following in a brace of grenades as they blew a hole in the horde and broke the siege on her pit; swept through as her pistols gave up the ghost and drew her sword from where it stood glowing in the earth, decapitated a templar warrior, inked in blood and the bizarre purple tattooing the high-caste seemed to favor, that stood over Lynn' prone form with a rather neat swing-and-tuck, and collapsing to the cover of the dirt wall with a creak of the armor.  
She gasped once, twice, took a deep one, let it out, and rolled over carefully. Lynn was sitting, stunned, at the opposite edge of the pit. Rockwaller affected a cheerful, bored, rather nonchalant smile that she knew was wasted against her helmets tint, and said, "How's it going?  
Lynn stared at her as the council of executives might see the Cirque du Soleil wander into its boardroom for coffee.  
"The battle, Addy. How's the battle?"  
Stare.  
"The battle, Adrena! How's it going?"  
Lynn blinked, slowly. She seemed to be attempting to speak, made several false starts, began and ended at the same time, and finally just shook her head.  
Rockwaller levered her head over the edge of the hole, letting a line of visor two inches high peek over the top.  
The battlefield was swept with devastation. It looked like it had been in a frontal collision. Debris, wreckage, shattered vehicles lay everywhere; bodies, suited and unsuited, human and Lowardian, lay in a denser sprinkling, interposed among the heavier pieces. Clouds of black smoke, leaking steam, sporadic kinetic and energy fire, screams of pain and pleasure from throats comely and horrific all filled the air, painting a dark and evil portrait of torment and distress. A thick, malevolent cloud of pounding Lowardians stood still at the edge of the arena, waiting for their chance, pouring onto the mosaic of horror to add their own atrocities and suffering to the mix.  
She sank back with a start, turned-  
Lode.  
Specialist Wade Lode, Nerdlinger, the kid. Twenty-two damn years old. Signed on when the war had swept up Kim and Ron. Satiny black hair and outrageous brown eyes that had never seen a day of combat. Skin the color of fresh coffee.  
He lay, disturbingly bloodless, with a fist-sized cauterized hole in his helmet.  
The back of his helmet.  
His hand had never reached a weapon.  
His hand-  
Gleaming-  
Yes, it was time.

She nestled in the ripped mud of the trench and clutched her rifle to her chest. Water pooled in the nooks and crannies of the weapon as she watched. The rain had begun again.

She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the blood pounding behind them, the adrenaline. She clenched her hands tightly, the remains of her manicure drawing blood from her palms.

She knew.

Reaching into a pocket, she withdrew a miraculously dry slip of paper and a battered grease pen. She calmly laid it on the plastic stock of her rifle, smoothing out its wrinkles with hectic effort, and scrawled her own epitaph.

Finished, she put the slip of paper back in her pocket, took a breath, picked up her sword from where it stuck out of the ground, slung her rifle, and hiked herself out into the fire.


	6. 06 Dénouement

Adrena Lynn sat in her foxhole, dumbfounded, as the Rock came and went.

* * *

Rifleman Roger "Hawkeye" McClellan and Private Al Winters lay low in the mud, pressing their bodies against the ground as one would embrace a lover. It was not passion that drove them, though, but the Lowardian bombardment that had reduced their berm to a ditch.

* * *

COMEONTAKEITTAKEITTAKEITYOULIKETHATHUHYOUSONSOF BITCHESCOMEONCOMEONCOMEONYEAHYOUBASTARDSTHISIS

WHATHUMANSTASTELIKEI

Corpsman Camille Léon fired her last three rounds into the face of the high-caste Lowardian warrior that held her, grabbed for her knife, and had first her arm, and then her head severed.

* * *

Warrant Officer Senior Senior Jr. rigged the last cord, drove the light tank a last dozen feet, whispered a final goodbye, and exploded in holy flame.

* * *

Time after time after time, baptismal cannon fire exploded around PFC Corchev's hole. He was beginning to think they were just playing with him, when it hit him.

* * *

Corporal Yori Yamanouchi managed to get out her last words into her personal data correspondent, just before her body, spirit, and mind reached a parting of the ways. The words were sent out from her suit and picked up as part of a routine information transfer by Global Justice and UN HQ. "Tengoku de omachi shite imasu."

* * *

The words of Corporal Satherin might have been considered a sequel. "Those poor bastards, they haven't got a chance."

* * *

Private Winters crawled the dozen feet to Lynn's hole, arriving miraculously unscathed. Lynn had roused herself and was laying down her last futile gesture of defiance with the shotgun she procured, apologetically, from the body next to her. She and Winters chatted for awhile, and, right before the trench was targeted by a Lowardian STM, accidentally broadcast a final salute over the comm-net: "... and that bitch still has my gun..."

* * *

Somewhere, high above it all, the light of a planet winked out of existence as another mission was accomplished.

* * *

Rising throughout the battlefields tumultuous roar of death and pain and ending, a thin bugle cry echoed.  
With a powerful, thickly roar, the eyes of every member of the battle turned upward, seeking out the source of the sound.  
Rockwaller blew again, sending a shrill but piercing note of gloom and hope spinning through the convoluted depths of the trumpets brassy curves.  
And the 77th, 81st, and 102nd Infantry Divisions, each and every one mounted on electric steeds, swept forward and charged.  
And in the lead, armor marred and rent, helmet missing, her own blood coating her arm in rivulets, clinging to consciousness with every shred of her fury and a stubborn refusal to die yet, a gruesome, slashing scar checking across her left cheek, sword held high, etched steel and fire at the forefront of the storm, rode the Rock, eyes like a thousand furies, and parting the tides of darkness like the horizon.  
The Colonel, on the edge of unconsciousness, saw the sight, and marshaled his strength for one last transmission.  
"Thank you, Ms. Rockwaller. If you'll take the helm?"

* * *

They looked on as she was buried. She had led them to victory, a hero in her own right, finally grown into the woman she was supposed to be.

Hundreds of roses lay on the rough fiberboard casket, where they came from no one was sure. Her rifle lay over them, holding them down and out of the grasp of the icy wind. A slip of paper was wedged into the weapon's action.

"For Kim."

It began to rain.


End file.
